Pfffftt!

So yeah...a couple of weeks back I was on top of my work.
I had thee assignments to fulfil. The first was a 2500 word essay, complete with presentation. The second was a piece of flash animation with for some reason a long 1500 word evaluation to go with it. The last was a VFX show real.
A lot to do but not difficult and manageable. Days before the big essay hand in I'd completed it and its presentation, so I handed it in. The flash animation was simple and some how I managed to force a large evaluation out of something with so limited a process and despite levels of over ambition, which resulted in me going into uni for several consecutive days, all early mornings to late evenings, I finished my show real. Oh and I was very ill too.

Huzzah.

Then night before hand in my memory stick drowned in my laundry. I thought I'd backed everything up. Nope.
Here is what remains.

My essay
My flash animation
Half my show real

Now I have to recreate my evaluation and the second half of my show real. Ok I'm in the proses of redoing the last half of my show real and I can do this essay of an evaluation. Can't I? Right?

....

So, Whats happening?

Last week spent two full days in the uni library fraping away on the laptop typing my 2500 word essay. Then handed it in this morning, on time. Did it. Yay!

So anything else? I'm currently working on a VFX show real which is to be handed in at the end of the week. So far, on Nuke, I've rotoscoped a penguins tummy with the aim of changing its colour, of course, and appropriately layered and altered the colour of an animated short.

At this point I was going to ramble about problems I encountered, how I overcame them and, blah, blah, blah...but for some reason I can't upload the pics to go with it so I'll do it next time.

Anyway,remember Deep and the robots I was working on? Well some western style cartoon robots were chosen and I'm animating the effects instead but I don't mind too much. Its kinda nice doing a few explosions and fire, something I may not have done otherwise. I've done all the shots. I now just need someone to finish the last two so I can make some robot heads go boom.

Nearly finished some work....

As yesterday was such a disappointment I forced my self out of bed early again to attempt those animations. Over all it was about six hours work and almost all finished. The hardest part was creating a walk because it has large feet and a birdlike leg structure-it was a little awkward to decide how high the foot could lift. (The answer was very looooowe with long strides-this really emphasised the weight though.)

Looking so much better than yesteday...

 

 

Anyway I should really hand in my concept for this guy. My plan was to hand it in with some nice animations to it would look good but I believe the dedline is some time around now.

I tried to do some work...really...

So yesterday I arived at uni early to do some tests animations for the Deep project on ToonBoom. I decided I was was feeling enthusiastic and that I would get some proper work done. It took the first hour to find ither a computer that worked or would run toonboom without asking for an adminastrative pasword. Anyway four hours later my animation was almost complete and then it stoped saving. I had been saving it to my memory stick so I assumed it was faulty any tried to save it to the computer's hard drive-it didn't work ither. I then discovered that almost all my work had disapeared.

Meh.

Redid the entire thing badly in about half an hour so I could use it as a blue print for the next day.

 

It was meant to be my drone. Not looking to great.

More design stuff

My newest task has been to create some concept work for a short anime sequence. I'm looking at creating some robots/drones (roughly human sized) with the capability of fire power. Its been a loooong time since I've last drawn any bots and I'm just realising ow much I've missed it. This is a brief post as I've only done a little so far. Plus once I've done more and probably changed it several times over I'll rant with more depth. Any way here is a sample.

There. I've gone with organic structures. Tacking into consideration this is for an anime I'm rather against using blocks, aggressive pointy bits and anything that may resemble the original transformers series from the 80s (but I've watched the entire thing and I loved it). Anyway the point I want to get to is that bots most frequently seen in anime are not like that. The are mostly composed of curves and usually have an over all organic silhouette.

Thats me done fore now.

So another project and a restart

Ok. As soon as I came back to uni I was ambushed by a third year, Omari, and his Final Major Project. The simplified basic concept: Little Loud: The Animated Series is a about a good little girl with a big bad shadow.

The project is to be around three minuits long and we are doing one episode which is set predominently in the child's bedroom, at night. The advantage of this story is that it is simple making it easy to to tell within a short space of time and the single setting also means you don't bombard the adience with too much info within a short time frame. Its logical.
The characters are the girl and her shadow.

My first task has been to work on character design. I noticed that his mood board was mostly comprised of gothic imagery, the majority was identifyably Tim Burton apeal so I asked if this was the visual vibe he was going for but this was not the case-it was mearly insparation for the shadow.
Anyway here are my first design ideas.

She is meant to be shy and timid ten year old who is creative and exciable when alone. She sometimes turns here blanket into a cape and (obviously) in here PJs.

 

You get the idea.

 

 

 

After spending time crafting and egineraing this crafting Omari and I had a meeting were he told me I had to change race and shape. Shere was to be african/carabean. Meh. Nothing wrong with that. Its what you do as a character designer. So I wnet off and did these.



Since the last meeting Omari had a better idea of what sort of style he want to go for but he likes the character so I've got to take these drawings and create the stylised variation. I've got some shadow concepts which I'll discus in a different blog so see yah.

Still alive, I think...

Ok it's obvious: I haven't been around for a while. Why? Long story short a lot of crap happened within a very short space of time and I allowed my self to be distracted. I lost sight of my plans, my enthusiasm and, apart from Project Cheese, I stopped attending uni.. I am greatly annoyed with my self-it took me a long time to decide what wanted to do with my future plus no one thought I'd ever make it to university, or college even. You get the gist.

So what happened to Project Cheese? I was enjoying the entire project. It was going well, it was ahead of schedule, someone vital stopped coming to uni and gradually this caused the entire thing to loose that solidity. It did get completed. Hate how it turned out though. The compositor of my group reordered the shots as he saw fit (ignoring the animatic and notes I left for him.) He then proceeded to hand it in without informing me, despite the fact that I asked him to show me before hand so, as director I, could check it and perhaps work on making alterations.
Usually, as a director, it would be my role to sit with the individual editing the shots together or at least watch a short edited sequence and give it the "all clear" so you can make sure that it is just right but if that person starts and finishes the edit without informing you then it is out of your hands.

Perhaps I'm just blaming someone for my falier. Maybe this only happened because I was a bad director. I'm not looking for sympathy, I don't feel sorry for my self, I'm just disappointed.